On a crowded film festival landscape — especially in the Bay Area — it’s a real achievement to hit the magical 10-year mark. So congratulations to the folks at Cine+Mas SF for the 10th San Francisco Latino Film Festival, now expanded to 17 days and nine venues — seven in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The official opening night is 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 14, at the Alamo Drafthouse’s New Mission Theater (2550 Mission St.) with a screening of Abner Benaim’s documentary of musician, actor and activist Ruben Blades. Spanning his 50-year career, the documentary takes us from the center of New York’s salsa revolution of the 1970s to a failed attempt to become president in his native Panama.

This is a pulse-pounding portrait that won the Audience Award at the prestigious South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, this year — and the perfect segue into the opening-night party that follows.

The festival closes with only the fifth feature-length film directed by a woman in Cuba. Day Garcia’s crowd-pleasing “Lucas Como Sara,” which makes its U.S. debut at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 30 at the Roxie theater (3117 16th St.), is a wacky comedy that takes place in 1980s Cuba.

In between are 35 programs of feature-length fiction and documentary films and a vast array of shorts, including many directed by Bay Area filmmakers (the “Close to Home” shorts program is all Bay Area; it screens at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 14, at the Roxie). Films come from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Peru, Spain, Uruguay and the U.S., with many filmmakers in attendance.

In addition to the seven Mission District venues, headed by the Alamo and Roxie, programs also will screen in the East Bay at BrasArte (1901 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley) and EastSide Cultural Center (2277 International Blvd., Oakland).

Luchino Visconti: Cinema of Struggle and Splendor: A major retrospective of the Italian master at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive begins with his poke at the movie business, 1951’s “Bellissima” (7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 14), with the great Anna Magnani as a former actress trying to stage-manage her 7-year-old to stardom; and ends with his last work — among his greatest — the opulent and ambitious 1976 film “The Innocent” (Nov. 30), a tragedy about a Sicilian aristocrat (Giancarlo Giannini) and his neglected wife (Laura Antonelli).

Visconti (1906-76), from a wealthy Italian family that stretched back centuries (he was a count), began as a Neorealist filmmaker — along with Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica — but soon forged his own path. In the 1940s he made Neorealist classics, most notably “La Terra Trema” (7 p.m. Sept. 21, about the struggles of fishing families in a small seaside village) but soon decided, counterintuitively, that the way to the truth was not through realism, but operatic artifice.

That dichotomy existed in his own life. Visconti was a wealthy aristocrat, but also a lifelong member of the Communist Party. He got into filmmaking out of boredom, when one of his celebrity friends — the fashion designer Coco Chanel — introduced him to French director Jean Renoir. Perhaps they forged a quick friendship because Renoir also came from a wealthy and famous family — his father being, of course, the painter Auguste Renoir.

Visconti assisted Renoir on two films from the 1930s, and from that experience his path was set. Renoir suggested to Visconti that he adapt James M. Cain’s noir novel “The Postman Always Rings Twice” as his first film, and that he did — without bothering to procure the rights. Thus “Ossessione” (7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 16) — the first adaptation of the Cain novel, years before the Lana Turner-John Garfield classic — was long unavailable in the U.S.

But the works with which Visconti became identified were those grand-scale films with striking color palettes, an aristocratic setting and the underpinnings of class warfare. He drew upon his experiences as a theater and opera director in films such as “Senso” (Nov. 1, Nov. 10), about the tragic love affair between an Austrian officer (the American actor Farley Granger, with voice dubbed) and an Italian countess (Alida Valli) during the Austrian occupation of Italy in the mid-1800s; A “Godfather”-like family crime saga from 1960, “Rocco and His Brothers” (Oct. 4, Oct. 7) and most movingly, “The Leopard” (Oct. 13, Oct. 21).

Set in the 1860s, when a revolution would unite the Italian provinces into one country, “The Leopard” is about a Sicilian count (Burt Lancaster) who realizes his way of life is doomed and begins planning for his family’s survival. A three-hour film, it culminates with one of the greatest set pieces in cinema history, a nearly hour-long ballroom sequence that says everything about the passing of an era and the total reorganization of Italian society through a series of looks, expressions and movement that is deep, rich and emotional.

The end of this masterpiece is a profound meditation on mortality, so pitch-perfect and conveying so many complexities at a very simple level. It elevates “The Leopard” into one of the greatest of all epics.